(upbeat music)
- I'm Dr. Jason Rudolph,
and I'm an orthopedic surgeon.
I have a niche sub-specialty in foot and ankle
injuries and surgery.
I also do a fair amount of trauma,
orthopedic fractures.
I do a lot of sports medicine as well,
but my real niche sub-specialty is foot and ankles.
Getting into medicine is something
I've always wanted to do.
It's funny, since forever,
whenever anybody asked me what I wanted to be,
I always said I wanted to be a doctor.
Now, at the beginning, the reason I chose
medicine was because I was going to cure cancer.
I had a grandfather that died of cancer,
and I as going to cure it.
By the time I hit high school,
I realized that I'm not going to cure cancer
and that I played so many sports
from baseball to basketball to football
to lacrosse that I saw so many injuries
and injured myself enough that I decided
maybe sports medicine is a better direction to go.
At that point, sports plus injuries
plus medicine, that equaled orthopedic surgery.
So even before getting into college,
my goal was always to become an orthopedic surgeon.
I went to undergraduate school at Princeton University,
where I played football on the varsity football team,
so suffered plenty of injuries
and therefore can relate to athletes pretty well.
After college, I went to medical school in Chicago,
The Chicago Medical School.
Then I came back to the East Coast,
did my residency at Monmouth Medical Center,
which is a smaller community hospital
on the New Jersey shore.
For my fellowship, I went down
to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee,
which is now back to the big city again
where I spent a lot of time doing
my sub-specialty training in foot and ankle,
as well as major orthopedic trauma.
Going into my fellowship,
at that point I was married.
My wife, Dr. Stacy Resnick,
also practices at Coordinated Health.
She's a podiatrist who does foot and ankle injuries as well.
The one thing she told me is don't go into foot and ankle.
You can anything else you want to do.
So my fellowship originally was in just orthopedic trauma.
As it turned out, one of the leaders
in the orthopedic division was the head of foot and ankle,
who had never had a fellow.
As it sort of played out,
most of my time was spent doing foot and ankle injuries
and reconstructive trauma injuries.
At this point, there's plenty of different
foot and ankle injuries, so we've managed to work it out.
I can do anything from the end of the foot,
hammertoes and bunion surgery,
to the middle of the foot,
where you're starting to deal with more arthritis
and bigger arthrodesis type surgeries,
or fusion surgeries.
I have never told somebody, "Why did you come in?"
We're here.
That's my job is to see you whenever I--
as soon as I can, whenever I can.
When people thank me for being available
to see them, that's the job, that's the deal,
that's why I'm here.
Last year I had a guy who was out in the woods
dear hunting, fell out of his deer stand
and had to crawl two miles to get to a street,
where they finally took him to the hospital
and he had a terrible ankle,
or distal tibia fracture,
and that was sort of right in my ballpark.
Less than a year later, he's back full-time to his life,
although I'm positive he's given up climbing tree stands.
I played sports my whole life.
I have kids that now play sports.
Now my guys are getting a little bit older,
I still want to be involved,
so now I'm trying to become more involved with those guys.
I think since I've played sports, you understand
the athlete attitude, and you understand
the moms and dads and where they're coming from,
and it's important as the team doctor
or the doctor for the athlete,
that even though you know they want to get out there
as fast they can, and you want to get them
out there as fast as you can,
a lot of times you have to talk
from the doctor perspective
and make people realize that
that's not always the safest thing
or the best thing for the athlete,
even though I know how much
they want to get back out there and play.
I knew I always wanted to be back in the Northeast.
I grew up in New Jersey, on the shore.
I have family that were from Philadelphia
and the area here.
From college, I played at Princeton,
we used to come up to play Lehigh and Lafayette,
and I knew the Lehigh Valley fairly well.
But now that the Lehigh Valley is this true
cosmopolitan area and really a big city,
although we're spread out over a large
square mileage, we have the ability here, now,
at Coordinated Health where we have six podiatrists,
we have two orthopedic surgeons specializing
in foot and ankle injuries,
that we can offer the complete treatment
for any foot and ankle injury.
That means anywhere from diabetic shoeware
to orthotics to non-surgical treatment.
We can offer, now, inhouse, we have
the ability to get an MRI done
sometimes within the same visit that you're here seeing us.
We have CT scans.
We have, obviously, high-level radiologists
that read these things for us.
We have the hospitals, the two hospitals,
and three surgery centers that we can do
the actual procedures at.
Now everything is offered within one facility,
one community, and the communication
between the different doctors,
even specifically within foot and ankle,
is so open that there's no reason
to go elsewhere for that, because we really
have created a real complete team, I think,
which nobody else in the Valley can offer.
(upbeat music)